And so it was that this kind of experience was repeated over and over again as I journeyed through desolated Belgium. The Germans put a deliberate policy of murder and of vandalism into awful execution.
They laid low the country on every hand. The traveler sees a remarkable country and a wonderful civilization, but one which has been annihilated by the unappreciative Hun, a brother to the beast. I have seen marvelously beautiful cathedrals, adorned by the conceptions of the greatest masters, built in honor of the one great Master who said, "All ye are brethren," shot to pieces by cannon, riddled by machine guns, burned up by flaming projectiles, thrown with terribly deliberate and accurate aim; cathedrals where the Christ had once been worshiped, and where the holy instincts of gentleness and love were inculcated. Now the figures of the Christ have sword thrusts in their sides and the hands and feet and face are pierced with bullets from the machine guns. I have seen widows wearing crape, with babies in their arms who cried for food and have been told by them as their eyes flamed up, how their loved ones were shot down by their sides or taken out and bayoneted in their sight; loved ones who had no part in the battle.
When the people learned that the German Army had entered the town they frequently took refuge in the cellar, but the relentless soldiers sought them out. They broke in the doors and windows of the houses, stole the goods which they could carry, shot the men and then set fire to the home, and in not a few cases they shot and bayoneted the women and the babies. Priests also were made a special object of attack and the repeated narratives of particular cruelty toward them could not but carry conviction. A priest of Louvain who had escaped to Holland, later told me of forty of his fellow-priests being trapped in their headquarters and every one shot down.
At the little town of B—— the soldiers demanded the keys to the church from the Belgian priest, in order that they could go in and burn it. When the priest refused they dragged him out of the house, over to the steps of the church, where they cut off his ears and nose and left him there alone, where Death shortly found him. These facts are corroborated by witnesses, who take solemn oath to the truth of them; and to anyone who has been in Belgium during the present war, no tale of savagery would sound too wild for belief. The Huns have forgotten that they ever were human beings and have reverted to the wolf, and so they swarmed through Belgium and through northern France, this scourge of God, two million strong, blasting and withering everything they touched.
As I traveled through the country I saw houses by the scores and hundreds upon which machine guns had been turned, while occupied by unarmed and innocent people, and the tragedy was fearful. These things I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. The high power of these modern shooting devices is almost beyond conception. At L—— I saw two rapid-fire guns as I got off the train at the station, little gray, innocent looking things, a sort of rifle barrel mounted on a tripod, with a shield for the operator to stand behind, yet those guns could shoot seven hundred times a minute and when equipped with an electric motor they shoot four times that number, and they shoot to kill. Often with a range of two to three miles, they will deal sure death at a distance of a mile and a half. They are constantly trained on the city. Then their big guns astound the reason!
The Springfield rifle has a range of five miles and the bullet on leaving the gun goes at a velocity of half a mile a second, or enough momentum to drive it through four and one-half feet of white pine. The siege guns which the Germans dragged up before the forts of Liége could drive a tremendous hole a foot and a half in diameter through twelve feet of solid concrete or four feet of solid steel.
Yet, notwithstanding this, having all the hellish machinery of war that the mind is capable of devising, they want still more and are ready to pay handsome sums to clever inventors who will turn out new and unheard of instruments of torture and death. They build boats which submerge themselves beneath the ocean, and from this position of vantage hurl deadly missiles and send to the bottom giant ships carrying thousands of innocent human lives; they experiment until they find deadly gases which can be projected at the enemy, causing indescribable agony as they are breathed into the lungs, while the unhappy victim writhes in pain and shortly dies; that they may be more terrible than Attila, the Hun, in their policy of frightfulness, in order to subjugate the world, yet they have failed, in that they have neglected to take into view the eternal laws of God. They have forgotten that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Eternal laws cannot be frustrated, and Germany has failed! Again I say, Germany has failed! History teaches him who is able to learn, that the Creator never meant one régime to rule the world. The Hun has failed. The Kaiser does not govern the Almighty nor run this universe. Man is dust and God alone is great.